Nine Coaches Waiting

by Mary Stewart

The smell of coffee, cats, drains, wine and wet air

The old Comte de Valmy, Philippe’s grandfather, had been enormously wealthy, and on his

death the property had been divided between his three sons, the new Comte Étienne, Léon, and Hippolyte.

Léon stayed on at Valmy and managed it,

Then, long after anyone had ceased to expect him to do so, Étienne had married, and within a couple of years Philippe had been born.

Philippe had left Paris to live with his uncle Hippolyte in Thonon.

officially, Valmy is Philippe’s home

a nine-year-old boy. Philippe was certainly better off at the Villa Mireille with Uncle Hippolyte.

Monsieur Hippolyte had to fulfil an engagement which took him to Greece and Asia Minor for some months.

Perhaps loneliness was nothing to do with place or circumstance; perhaps it was in you, yourself. Perhaps, wherever you were, you took your little circle of loneliness with you …

Number 14, Rue de Printemps. The paint was peeling off the walls; the wrought-iron of the balconies, that I remembered as a bright turquoise, showed in this light as a patched and dirty grey.

The top balcony, our balcony, looked very small and high.

it was merely that this was the handsomest man I had ever seen. My experience, admittedly, had not been large, but in any company he would have been conspicuous.

Just because the man looked like Milton’s ruined archangel and chose to appear in the hall like the Demon King through a trap-door, it didn’t necessarily mean that I had to smell sulphur.

The man’s charm was palpable, and he had taken the trouble to turn it on full blast … and I was all the more vulnerable for being tired, lonely, and a bit bewildered.

why I had launched so unerringly on that sea of lies about the elderly lady from Lyons,

lack of privacy in the Home that I deeply respected anybody’s right to it, and would have looked on any attempt at intimacy with Philippe as a kind of mental violation.

but soon I realised that it wasn’t entirely Léon de Valmy’s fault. Philippe systematically avoided him. He would only go down the library corridor with me when we had seen the wheelchair safely out beyond the ornamental ponds or at the far side of the rosery; he seemed to have the faculty for hearing the whisper of its wheels two corridors away, when he would invariably drag at my hand, persuading me with him to vanish out of his uncle’s sight.

know that on one or two occasions I found myself resenting it on his behalf.

He shook his head. ‘It is not theirs to give to me. It was my father’s and it is mine.’

“But Hippolyte must have the child if anything happens to us. Hippolyte must look after the child. He is not to be left to Léon.”

he was using – not a wheel, but an atomic blast, to break a butterfly.

and all the urns and stone tubs that lined the château terraces held their constellations of narcissus and

jonquil that danced with the wind.

The single bistro had put out its red-and-black striped awning, and in spite of faded paint and peeling walls the houses looked gay with their open doors and the coloured shutters fastened back from the windows.

It was a pleasant, peaceful, light-hearted little scene, and my own heart was light as I surveyed it. It was a lovely morning; I was free to do as I wished with it for two hours; I had some money in my pocket; the shadow of the Constance Butcher Home for Girls dwindled and shrank to nothing in the warm Savoyard light.

Mrs. Seddon, in the intervals of anti-histamine, seemed to live exclusively on aspirin and something she called Oh Dick Alone, while I (after half a lifetime of White Windsor) had developed a passion, which had to be satisfied frequently, for the more exotic soaps.

He was dressed in khaki shorts and a windcheater.

Everybody needs a – a centre. Somewhere to go out from and come back to. And I suppose as you get older you enjoy the coming back more than the going out.’

moved with a scream like a mandrake

torn up in a midnight wood.